Dr. Paul Debevec is the director of the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. On this page of his Web site, he presents some of his recent work that involves simulating light sources for a virtual environment. This is done with a sphere of different colored lights that can produce lighting effects representative of the virtual conditions. His most recent addition...

Haptics is the science of incorporating touch and physical stimuli into computer applications. A haptics interface can allow the user to feel responses from a program, thereby providing an additional level of perception in a virtual environment, for example. This site hosts the proceedings of the 2003 EuroHaptics conference. Over 30 papers and several more poster presentations are available,...

How Stuff Works (see also MET report from November 16, 1998) provides this overview of how "augmented reality" will work. The author predicts that computer graphics, which have become much more sophisticated since the original computer games, will soon "seem all too real." He describes how researchers are working "to pull graphics out of your television screen or computer display and integrate...

This article from New Scientist News discusses the possibility that Sony might be able to develop a real life matrix. That is, people may be able to watch movies and play computer games in which they can also get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. The prospect was raised by Sony's approval for a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain. The author...

The Experimental Virtual Environment (EVE) is a project being conducted by the Helsinki University of Technology and the high-performance computing and networking center in Finland. The EVE encloses the user inside three walls and a floor that are rear projection screens, and the user can interact with the environment with a head tracking unit and other sensors. A brief introduction is given on...